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This chapter brings places the transformation of the handloom industry in the context of the emergence of India’s modern economy and examines how it came to be incorporated into what came to be known as the ‘informal sector’. It also uses the conclusions of this study to reflect on the divergent paths of economic development, both within India and globally.

This chapter outlines the three main concepts that are derived from transnational migration studies. Transnational migration signifies mobility that not only spans geographies but also space and social fields, allowing scholars to account for and understand how (new) forms of identity, belonging, and nationhood materialize. In turn, the ongoing societal changes taking shape by way of transnational migration reflect a new reality and social condition, that of mobility and encounters between/among people across relations of difference that are themselves constantly shifting. To expand on new directions for management scholarship that are possible based on transnational migration studies, this chapter identifies three key concepts: multiscalar global perspective, moving beyond methodological nationalism and globalhistorical conjunctures. Each of these concepts are expanded upon in terms of their main points and contributions to thinking about the new social condition of mobility as it relates to theorizing people, difference and work—an endeavour that is the focus of the following three chapters.

What is the history of a community with no homeland? This chapter discusses precursors to contemporary expatriate life in Nepal, proposing that it is only through a set of contingent historical conjunctures that modern expatriate life takes on the configuration that it does. British colonialism in India and related attitudes towards the family life of the British in India resonate with contemporary practices. Yet Nepal has its own distinctive relationship with foreign presence, shaped particularly by the collapse of the Rana Regime in 1950 and U.S. Cold War policy. The rise of Nepal as a destination on the Hippy Trail in the 1960s also contributed to the impressions and infrastructures of transnational labor in Kathmandu. These are intertwined with global ideas about overseas business that developed after World War II. Bringing together these diverse stories provides a basis for the rise of Expatria in late twentieth-century Kathmandu.

The origins of the First Pegu Dynasty began at Muttama (Martaban) in the second half of the thirteenth-century. It was shaped by several “push” and “pull” factors then current in the region, particularly several long-term patterns between the eleventh and sixteenth-centuries, some of which came together only during the second half of the thirteenth, creating a “conjuncture” in Fernand Braudel’s sense, with a direct and indirect impact on the making of the First Kingdom of Pegu. On the north was Pagan, whose decline allowed Lower Myanmar to assert its independence. To the west lay the maritime region of Arakan with its gaze towards both the Bay of Bengal and the interior of Upper Myanmar. Although it had not yet fully integrated the various components that came together subsequently in the sixteenth-century as the Kingdom of Mrauk-U, its underpinning maritime and commercial foundations were already there and operating, which were to affect the history of Pegu. On the other side of the Gulf of Muttama lay Ayuthaya, dominated by Thai speakers who had moved from their earlier centers in northern and central Thailand (the agrarian interior) to the increasingly blossoming commerce of the coasts, a process that was to have an impact on the rise and development of Pegu subsequently. Towards the south lay many port cities such as Htaway (Tavoy) and Myeik (Mergui), which acted as windows to Pegu’s external world and maritime Southeast Asia.

Chapter 1 develops the framework through which urban political (dis)orders are explored in subsequent chapters. It begins by engaging debates about critical vantage-point. It advances a Gramscian approach to urban regime analysis, through which it pivots between perspectives, and explores the encounter between power and resistance in struggles over the normalisation, disruption and transformation of austere neoliberalism. It is further framed by neo-Gramscian conjunctural analysis, which derives from Marxist thinking about the history and periodisation of capitalist development and phases of struggle. The problem arising from this framing is how the dynamics of crisis, neoliberalisation, austerity and resistance play out in cities and constitute urban political (dis)orders, and what these in turn reveal about conjunctural continuity and change.

This essay examines the physical and metaphysical, literal as well as metaphorical concept-phenomenon of shadow. By analyzing a range of sooty silhouettes and dusky patterns spanning the geometrical to the shapeless, it asks how such strange and uncanny variations on the intensity of darkness from blackish to dim operate not only across the spatial arts but cloud what is happening to our brains in times of cognitive automatism when tracking and collecting algorithms rule. By investigating this emerging shadow- land of troubled conjuncture wherein the brain-mind is no longer seen as a tightly encased organ but is ambiguously merged with other bodies, species, materials, machines, key aesthetic and philosophical implications come to the fore. Identifying the opaque socio-cultural forces pressuring for the creation of this shady combinatoric sheds light on the disturbing turn to universal datafication and our aggregated online selves caught up in the obscure flows of information.

The chapter opens with a conversation about the demands and difficulties of theory, before turning to a reflection on the pleasures of seductions of discovering theory. We then reflect on the spaces between theory and politics before turning to issues of intellectual and political ambivalence.